r passengers, for New York, unless a guard was
left for their protection. For this purpose, and in order to insure the
safety of passengers and property passing over the route, a temporary
force was organized, at considerable expense to the United States, for
which provision was made at the last session of Congress.

This pretended community, a heterogeneous assemblage gathered from
various countries, and composed for the most part of blacks and persons
of mixed blood, had previously given other indications of mischievous
and dangerous propensities. Early in the same month property was
clandestinely abstracted from the depot of the Transit Company and taken
to Greytown. The plunderers obtained shelter there and their pursuers
were driven back by its people, who not only protected the wrongdoers
and shared the plunder, but treated with rudeness and violence those who
sought to recover their property.

Such, in substance, are the facts submitted to my consideration, and
proved by trustworthy evidence. I could not doubt that the case demanded
the interposition of this Government. Justice required that reparation
should be made for so many and such gross wrongs, and that a course of
insolence and plunder, tending directly to the insecurity of the lives
of numerous travelers and of the rich treasure belonging to our citizens
passing over this transit way, should be peremptorily arrested. Whatever
it might be in other respects, the community in question, in power to do
mischief, was not despicable. It was well provided with ordnance, small
arms, and ammunition, and might easily seize on the unarmed boats,
freighted with millions of property, which passed almost daily within
its reach. It did not profess to belong to any regular government, and
had, in fact, no recognized dependence on or connection with anyone
to which the United States or their injured citizens might apply for
redress or which could be held responsible in any way for the outrages
committed. Not standing before the world in the attitude of an organized
political society, being neither competent to exercise the rights nor to
discharge the obligations of a government, it was, in fact, a marauding
establishment too dangerous to be disregarded and too guilty to pass
unpunished, and yet incapable of being treated in any other way than
as a piratical resort of outlaws or a camp of savages depredating on
emigrant trains or caravans and the frontier settlements of ci